Dr Paul Williams (he/him)

Paul Williams is a scholar of literature and popular culture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He particularly focuses on 1940s-1990s texts from Britain and North America, ranging across different cultural forms but paying close attention to comics and graphic novels. His research often examines economic and social systems of production, distribution, and reception, emphasising the importance of materiality when analysing comics and other texts, from the 'bookishness' of graphic novels to the manufacture of minicomics using a photocopier. 

Paul's latest book, The US Graphic Novel (2022), explores the history of US graphic novels from the 1910s to the present, showing how the graphic novel is the site of formal exchange between comics and other media such as silent film, the poster, and digital screens.

His monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics (2020) broke new ground by explaining how graphic novels were published, circulated, and discussed in North America between the mid-1960s and 1980. Dreaming the Graphic Novel won the 2020 Book Prize in the Comics History Awards presented by the Grand Comics Database and was recognised by the Research Society of American Periodicals with an Honourable Mention in their 2019-20 Book Prize.

In 2016 Paul co-curated the exhibition The Great British Graphic Novel at the Cartoon Museum in London. This show was seen by over 10,000 people and was part of the AHRC Early Career Research Fellowship (£144,000) he was awarded in 2014 for the project Reframing the Graphic Novel.

Paul's additional research interests include:

• Critical theories of race and ethnicity (his book on Paul Gilroy was published in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series in 2012)
• Post-apocalyptic fiction (the subject of his 2011 monograph Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War)
• Writers connected to the South-West, especially John Betjeman, Laurie Lee, and Margaret Halsey
• The history of Cultural Studies
• The cultural and political impact of 1970s alternative psychotherapies
• American Studies (Paul belongs to Exeter's North American and Atlantic Research Group)

Paul teaches across many modules, often lecturing on comics, critical theory (Sianne Ngai and the Frankfurt School are particular favourites), and North American literature and culture.

Paul attended Malmesbury Comprehensive School 1991-98 and completed his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Exeter between 1998 and 2005. From 2005 to 2008 he undertook myriad teaching duties at Plymouth University, including the role of Lecturer in American Studies. He returned to the University of Exeter in 2008, working as a Teaching Fellow (2008-10), Lecturer (2010-14), Senior Lecturer (2014-20), and now Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (2020-).